


Acquaintance With the Waves

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Edwardian, Bittersweet, Childhood Memories, Crossdressing, Gen, Genderfuck, Grief/Mourning, Non-Linear Narrative, Playing dress-up, Shitty 19th century adventure novels, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 05:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19222888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Memories flood her like the tide. There is the attic, and the nursery, and there are the days when the world was an open shell, and the water's slap against the shore was a welcome call. They were twins then, and now she must be both of them at once.Or, scenes from Viola and Sebastian's childhood, as Viola tries to come to terms with the loss of her twin.





	Acquaintance With the Waves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lexigent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexigent/gifts).



When he can no longer bear the world he lives in now, no longer bear fluttering in the shadows, Cesario goes up to the headland, to the marble monument for the glorious dead of some far-off war. The waves are lapping at the rocks, tossing white foam up against the hidden reefs. From here, he can pretend the rocks below are the rocks he climbed in childhood, that the fishing boats bobbing out at sea are the ones that sold their wares in the Messaline fish market. 

In this golden hour, the sky rich-hued and soft, the winds brisk with promise at the close of day, Cesario lets the wind ruffle his hair, and he thinks of the bodies sinking below the waves. The waves, unhearing, hiss names in the gathering dusk.  _ Sebastiansebastianviolaviolashhhhhhhhhh.  _ It’s an incantation for two drowned memories, a requiem for a shadow dry upon the land. Sebastian lies buried in salt water, shredded upon the reefs. Now, he is a lost soul, wandering fitfully, and wondering why his twin   survives without him. And in that moment, he cannot be Cesario any longer and she is Viola again. 

She closes her eyes, letting the warmth of the sun play across them, because she is alone, and she is masked again. How different is this mask than the one she wore in childhood, how different it is to be oneself and another’s self. To be Viola is a fraught thing. To be Cesario is simpler by far. Cesario had a sister, Cesario is poor but worthy, and Cesario never had a brother who drowned and left him the one survivor. Cesario isn’t a twin. His sister was older, wiser, and now she is gone, drowned deep in love and held beside his heart. She lives in Cesario as Sebastian lives in Viola. Together they make someone new. 

Viola is not sure she wants to consider what that newness is. She lives in a world without her mirror image now, and as a child, she could never have pictured it. When her father died, when they left Messaline forever, even when Sebastian went to school, all pains and separations were only temporary. They were twins until the end, their lifelines tangled from birth, their destinies harmonizing. 

It is then that Viola begins to weep, for she is lonely. Orsino loves Olivia, Olivia loves Cesario, and Viola mourns because she does not know which one she should love, only that she is alone, without father, without brother, without home. And she has never been alone like this before; this ebb of passing time pulling her towards the setting sun. Memory floods her like the tide. There is the attic, and the nursery, and there are the days when the world was an open shell, and the water's slap against the shore was a welcome call. They were twins then, and now she must be both of them at once.

***

They lived in a world of closed doors and high garden walls, full of evasions and distances, and in this world of half-light and shadows, they had no choice but to rely upon each other. Barred from the grown-up world of business and the outside world of the town, Viola and Sebastian lived in a world of make-believe. 

Messaline was a small island, home to a mid-sized port town, and Viola and Sebastian’s house sat on a cliff, overlooking the town proper. If they climbed the garden wall (high and made of brick, so that no small child could escape) they could see the sea. Looking down the hill, along the shore, they could see the breakwater from their nursery window, the tall masts of the fishing boats poking up in the distance. The seagulls screamed from morning to night, cries mingling with the soft  _ sssshhhh  _ of the waves.

Viola and Sebastian’s father, distracted as he was by grief for his wife or concerns for his business, never lectured Viola and Sebastian more than half-heartedly over any infraction of rules. As long as they attended lessons, ate their meals, and seemed generally happy and presentable, he was pleased. He could even be attentive when he chose. But he was often gone away across the sea or down the coast, and so Viola and Sebastian grew up half-feral, left to their own devices. They were small, scrappy children, forever missing buttons or shoes, showing up to tea with muddy socks and uncombed hair. 

Left alone as they were, they were free to venture wherever they wished within the boundaries of the house and garden. On summer days, when the light did not fade until late, and it was all too easy to slip open the sash of the window onto the dim twilight, to climb out onto the grey slate roof of the gable below and slide down the trellis or the lead drainpipe into the deserted garden. Sebastian was always first, which irked Viola. 

“Watch me!” he cried, every time, flinging himself out into the dusk. 

Viola always laughed into a dirty sleeve when he fell into the shrubbery, and when she slid down the pipe, she did so without a sound. 

In the garden, grown grey in the late evening light, they’d dance their way through the overgrown topiary and make hooting noises like the ships in the bay, playing at pirates. Sometimes, their nurses thought it was owls. Sometimes they thought it was ghosts. But the nurse who lasted longest knew it was the children, and when the twins were ten, she had the nursery windows painted shut. The handyman did so haphazardly, and within a summer, the paint cracked and the window could be forced open once again. 

Inside the house, they made their own marvels. On the sort of rainy summer Saturday most beloved by children who live with one foot in mundanity and another in a world of their own invention, the twins went exploring. Through the quiet house they crept, spiraling up and through rarely used ends of hallways, they found the door to the attic. 

Unlike most attics in Messaline, theirs was tight and dry, smelling of mothballs and disuse. Tall shadows loomed like ghosts in the wan, stormy daylight the little windows at each end let in. Rain tapped against the windows, and dust drifted silently across the wooden floors. 

“We ought to have brought a lantern,” Sebastian said, listening to the sound of the rain’s clatter on the slate roof. 

“Cook would’ve said it would set the whole house ablaze if we went to ask her for one,” said Viola, who’d been the one to forget a candle. 

Even in the ragged gloom, they were able to make out chests and trunks, hulking and covered in dust, lying about the floor. Sebastian thrust open the first one with a lid his skinny, childish arms could lift. He grunted, and it came loose, revealing a disorderly hodgepodge of old-fashioned clothes. One by one, he lifted up dusty dresses, frilled shirts with their lace trimmings gone yellow, beautiful silk capes, and a black domino. Viola gasped. 

“Disguises!” 

She raced forward, wrapped herself in a cloak, and tried to strike a gallant pose. Instead, she tripped over the hem, and the attic rocked with their laughter when she fell. Sebastian dove into the trunk, came up with a moth-eaten gown, and shuffled it over his clothes, curtseying elaborately. 

They spent the whole afternoon rooting through cases and trunks, putting together a pile of faded silks and satins, hiding them in a dusty clothes press. Grinning at each other, they imagined themselves as pirates, hiding buried treasure in some far-off island. In that moment, the attic was transformed. It became an arena for imaginings. 

From then on, on the rainy days of which there were so many in Messaline, when sea and sky met at the horizon in a blur of grey, Viola and Sebastian came to the attic in their oldest play clothes, carrying candles and an armful of novels. They judiciously selected these novels from the library when Father was gone, since tutors and the nannies did not believed in entertainment, only in edification.  

Like sirens, the leather-bound volumes in Father’s library called irresistibly to Viola and Sebastian. They were forbidden fruit and keys to worlds unknown, all resting within staid covers. The twins devoured these stories of valiant gentlemen and beautiful ladies, robbers and pirates, knights, adventurers of all sorts, sitting in the half-light of the attic. And when they were through with quiet, they created stories of their own. 

Viola and Sebastian took their inspiration from the novels, took the stories within and brought them to awkward life, first in the attic by flickering flame. In mimicking the plots, they could escape the cold shores of Messaline for a few moments, sail far away to golden shores held only in their mind’s eyes. 

Sometimes, Viola was a fair lady, swaddled in moth-eaten silk and crowned with wax orange blossoms from some forgotten great aunt’s wedding gown. Sometimes, Sebastian was a pirate, a swashbuckling rogue in an old velvet cape. Viola’s name, being romantic and pleasantly foreign-sounding, was perfectly alright for the characters she played on these occasions, though she sometimes preferred to be called Thaisa when she played a queen. But Sebastian, who shared his name with his father and thus found it distasteful (though better, he conceded, than something like Andrew or Tobias), insisted on a new name for his pirate alter ego. And so, as a pirate or a highwayman or as some other dashing rogue, he was Roderigo. 

For the most part, Queen Thaisa and her privateer Roderigo were comfortable in their roles. But there were days and times when Viola eagerly eyed the rusted sword they’d found leaning against the attic wall, and hefted it in her hands, tensing her skinny arms, and days when Sebastian looked with longing on some impressive green brocade gown. Roderigo and Thaisa or Viola were as abandoned as the silks they wore on days like these. Sebastian became Lady Marina, drowning in the huge skirts of an old-fashioned dress. Viola donned breeches and called herself Cesario, pulling a feathered cap at a rakish angle on her forehead. 

On the first of these occasions, they stood staring uncomfortably at each other. In the half-light, dressed in each other’s costumes, they looked more similar to each other than ever. Sebastian found an old, cracked mirror, and they peered into it, seeing themselves refracted back, their near-identical faces multiplied. Sebastian shifted, and let out an uncomfortable huff of breath. Viola bent closer to the glass as though she’d been enchanted.

“If you cut your hair,” Sebastian said, breaking the quiet, “we could trick everyone and make people think they were talking to me and not to you!” 

“Why don’t you grow yours long?” Viola retorted. 

But she was already tucking her hair up beneath the cap, turning this way and that to see the effect. She squinted in the dim late afternoon light, and Sebastian laughed. 

“It’s like I’m you, and you’re me,” she said. 

“Well, isn’t that the point of being twins? We’re always together. Always shall be.” 

They spent a pleasant afternoon dancing and reading, all the same as always. And when it was time for tea, Sebastian told Viola he thought he made a prettier girl than she did. She punched him in the arm, and laughing, they retreated downstairs, locking up the secrets of the attic for another day.

***

Their halcyon days ended when they were twelve, when Sebastian was sent to school and Viola remained shut up in the house, rattling through disused rooms and taking her lessons with a distracted tutor. She felt utterly adrift without her twin, caught in that awkward period of childhood when play begins to be frowned upon, but when one is not ready for adulthood. Before, when she and Sebastian were lonely but together, she’d had a friend and family. Now, Viola’s father was just as distant, but a gulf separated her from Sebastian, and she could not cross it. She looked miserably out of the nursery window, at the grey sea and grey sky, and wondered what the mainland, where Sebastian went to school, was like. 

On the cold, bright days at winter’s end and spring’s anemic beginning, Viola would pad into Sebastian’s disused room, the cold of the floor radiating up through her stockings. Some of Sebastian’s clothing still rested, dusty, in his drawers. She unfolded a shirt, drew a jacket out of the wardrobe, found a cap on the wicker chair in the corner. In a frenzy of fumbling fingers, she stripped off her own girl’s clothes, pulled on Sebastian’s, struggling with the fastenings. 

When she put the cap on, over her dirty golden hair, and peered into the window, she saw Sebastian staring back, and for a moment, he was there with her. They were blended in her face, the same eyes, the same hair, the same impish smile. Viola tipped her hat over her eye, and then went to the window, slipped it open (for the paint had cracked a year or so before), and crawled out. 

And day by day, she ranged abroad. Climbing down the cliffs, Sebastian’s scarf knotted ‘round her neck, she walked the beach for hours, skipping stones at low tide, sitting on the rocks at high. Some days she dared to go into town, where she might be more easily recognized. There, she would walk into Messaline’s main square, and sit next to the fountain, built as a monument to some generous lady years before Viola’s time. 

The fountain’s statue represented the virtue of Patience, lazy as she leaned against her marble pillar, her stone eyes staring at nothing. No one seemed to notice Viola when she watched the water trail down the drapery and trace the curve of Patience’s breast, drip into her lap. Perhaps, such prurience was only to be expected from a weedy young boy. But Viola did not feel that this interest in the statue’s form had anything to do with Sebastian’s clothes. It just was. Patience was beautiful. And like Viola, she had to wait, perhaps while grieving. 

Sebastian returned home for the holidays thinner, paler, and jumping at shadows, begging his father not to make him return to school. And his father obliged, and Viola felt a thrill to know he had returned, and a secret shame in her bones, for she would have to give up her excursions. She could not be both Sebastian and herself. That was a strange, thrilling, freeing, mourning thing. 

But that night, they went up to the attic again, to the musty clothes, and the leather-bound novels, and Sebastian smiled his new, wan smile. 

“I hated school. Wasn’t any good without you, Viola.”

“I missed you.” 

It was all Viola could say. She looked at him then, pictured him in her blouse and her too-short skirt, her in his trousers and shirt, mirrors of each other in the dim light. 

“Well, what shall we do tomorrow?” Sebastian asked. 

“Stories, I think. Reading and playacting and all that.” 

They smiled, and the world righted itself because they were together. 

***

She wakes on a shore, wreathed in kelp and mired in the past, her lungs full to bursting with precious, blessed air. For a moment, Viola thinks this must be death, and indeed, heaven, if everything did not hurt so much and if it all was not so heavy. There is sand beneath her, and the horrors of the night come rushing back, for she realizes that she must have dragged herself here, swimming to shore after the lifeboat dashed itself to pieces on the reefs, when the storm clouds had at last blown themselves away and the cold, cruel stars gleamed down as sentinels to light her and her heavy dress to shore. And there, in the shallows, she must have fallen into the oblivion of sleep. 

Viola looks up at the sky, and there is an aching pain in her heart and in her whole body, as if she has fallen from the ivy trellis on the house of her childhood. But there is no Sebastian laughing at her clumsiness now, for he, like the lifeboat, was dashed to pieces on the rocks. And there is the last of her family, gone in a flash. Her twin, her mirror image. The tears flood in. 

The shallow water laps around her body, and the sky above her is tented grey with clouds as a light rain falls. She debates allowing the water to take her again, to let it complete what it has started and finish her destruction, but she is too tired to move. Everyone is dead, and she is as good as dead, and why bother surviving, when there is nothing left to survive for. 

And then she hears the shouts. 

“Miss Viola, Miss Viola! I think she’s alive!” 

She twitches into a sitting position, her whole body heavy, her dress torn at the sleeve, at the neckline. She doesn’t care. A rag-tag assortment of sailors run towards her, help her to her feet. Her legs collapse beneath her, and she sinks to the sand again. This time, the captain bends down, as if to tell her something. 

The girl Viola knows she must mourn. And as she has before, she will mourn by becoming. Carrying memories of her twin, gone forever in the ocean, stolen by the water, she will become anew. Viola and Sebastian in one body once again.  _ Be brave,  _ she tells herself, remembering what girls did in the books she read as a child. They took on new names and new clothing, dressed themselves in borrowed aspects, became lost brothers. She can do that. She has become Sebastian’s mirror before, on the beach, or in the attic in a moth-eaten velvet hat. Looking up at the captain through her fog of rain and tears, she tries to smile. 

“What country, friends, is this?” 

**Author's Note:**

> As you can probably tell, I took setting inspiration from the Trevor Nunn film since you mentioned you enjoyed that version. This should account for the aesthetically early Edwardian descriptions, and non-Mediterranean scenery. 
> 
> The names Viola and Sebastian use (minus, of course, the ones appearing in _Twelfth Night_ ) are lifted from _Pericles_. This seemed appropriate to me, considering the similar themes of watery separation. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!


End file.
